The development of new drugs for the brain has progressed at a much slower pace than that for the rest of the body. This slow progress has been due in large part to the inability of most drugs to cross the brain capillary wall, which forms the blood-brain barrier (BBB), to enter the brain. Approximately 100% of large-molecule drugs, and greater than 98% of small-molecule drugs do not cross the BBB. Only a small class of drugs, small molecules with a high lipid solubility and a molecular mass of less than 400-500 daltons actually cross the BBB. And of the small molecules that cross the BBB, only a small percentage cross the BBB in a pharmaceutically significant amount. (Pardridge, Molecular Innovations 3:90-103 (2003))
Only a few diseases of the brain respond to the small molecule drugs that can cross the BBB, such as depression, affective disorders, chronic pain and epilepsy. Far more diseases of the brain do not respond to the convention lipid-soluble small molecular mass drugs, such as Alzheimer disease, stroke/neuroprotection, brain and spinal cord injury, brain cancer, HIV infection of the brain, various ataxia-producing disorders, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Huntington disease, childhood inborn genetic errors affecting the brain, Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis. Even the few diseases of the brain for which effective small molecule drugs are available require further research and the development of new and improved drugs. Id.
Particularly difficult to treat are cancers of the brain. The common forms of cancer in the brain are glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) and anaplastic astrocytoma (AA). The mean survival for patients with GBM is approximately 10 to 12 months, while the median survival for patients with AA is 3 to 4 years. For patients with GBM, surgery will prolong their lives only a few months. (Kufe et al., Cancer Medicine, §§ 23 and 83, (6th ed. BC Decker, 2003)) Most cases where treatment of GBM is by surgery and local irradiation result in relapse within 2 to 4 cm of the original tumor margins. Id.
Current approaches to administer a drug that doesn't cross the BBB into the brain include by craniotomy, a process by which a hole is drilled in the head and the drug administered by either intracerebroventricular (ICV) or intracerebral (IC) injection. With IC administration, the drug remains at the site of deposit at the tip of the needle. With ICV administration, the drug distributes only as far as the ependymal surface of the ipsilateral ventricle and does not penetrate significantly into the brain parenchyma. Therefore, the IVC and IC administration methods reach less than 1% of the brain volume, and there are few diseases of the brain that can be treated by such limited penetration. Id.
In contrast, a transvascular route of drug delivery could treat virtually 100% of the neurons of the brain. Because every neuron is perfused by its own blood vessel, a drug administered tranvascularly can reach every neuron of the brain after crossing the BBB. However, because there is no drug-targeting system that will allow drugs to cross the BBB, the transvascular route of administration is unavailable to the vast majority of drug candidates.
In spite of the fact that most drugs and other molecules cannot cross the BBB, certain bacterial and fungal/viral pathogens are known to cross the BBB to cause infection. (Nassif, et al., Trends Microbiol. 10:227-232 (2002)) Such bacterial pathogens could be either extracellular such as Neisseria meningitidis, Streptococcus pneumoniae and Escherichia coli K-1, or intracellular such as Listeria monocytogenes or Mycobacterium tuberculosis. While the intracellular pathogens mostly invade the brain meninges by hiding inside infected leukocytes, the extracellular pathogens enter the central nervous system by first disseminating in the blood stream and then directly interacting with the luminal side of the cerebral endothelia, thereby disrupting the tight junctions of the brain microvascular endothelial cells. (Nassif et al., id.; Drevets & Leenen, Microbes Infect. 2:1609-1618 (2000); Kim, Subcell. Biochem. 33:47-59 (2000)) This interaction allows the pathogen to invade the brain meninges causing meningitis. Using in vitro monolayer and bilayer models for crossing the BBB as well as isolating bacterial mutants incapable of passage through such model mono- or bi-layers, a variety of bacterial proteins have been implicated in overall invasion and crossing of the BBB. (Huang & Jong, Cell. Microbiol. 3:277-287 (2001)) For example, E. coli K-1 genes such as ibeA, ibeB, aslA, yijP and ompA or N. meningitidis genes encoding proteins such as type IV pili, Opc, Opa, etc, and viral proteins such as HIV surface protein gp120, have all been suggested to allow effective invasion and crossing of the BBB to cause infection. In the case of extracellular bacterial pathogens, such proteins are believed to allow both adherence and subsequent breaching of the BBB for invasion of the meninges. (Nassif et al., id; Huang & Jong, id.) No single bacterial surface protein has been demonstrated to facilitate disruption of the tight junctions to allow crossing of the BBB.
An azurin-like gene exists in many gonococci and meningococci, such as Neisseria gonorrhoeae and N. meningitidis. (Gotschlich & Seiff, FEMS Microbiol. Lett. 43:253-255 (1987); Kawula, et al., Mol. Microbiol. 1:179-185 (1987)) Azurin is produced by a number of pathogenic bacteria and there is significant sequence homology among such genes. (Yamada, et al., Cell. Microbiol. 7:1418-1431 (2005)) A protein epitope termed “H.8” is conserved among pathogenic Neisseria species and is detected by the binding of a monoclonal antibody designated H.8. Two distinct gonococcal genes, laz and hp, encode proteins that cross-react with the H.8 monoclonal antibody. (Hayashi & Wu, J. Bioenerg. Biomembr. 22:451-471 (1990))
Many pathogens have azurin-like proteins, but Neisseria is unique in having the H.8 region attached to it. Laz and Lip are gonococcal outer surface proteins that contain a signal peptide lipoprotein consensus sequence that is recognized by the bacterial enzyme signal peptidase II, which processes the sequence to result in the N-terminal acylation of a cysteine residue with fatty acid and glycerol. (Hayashi & Wu, id.; Yamada, et al., Cell. Microbiol. 7:1418-1431 (2005)). The Lip lipoprotein, about 6.3 kDa, consists almost entirely of pentapeptide repeats of the motif Ala-Ala-Glu-Ala-Pro (AAEAP (SEQ ID NO: 25)), while the Laz lipoprotein, about 17 kDa, includes a 39 amino acid region at the N-terminus containing imperfect AAEAP (SEQ ID NO: 25) repeats. (Gotschlich & Seiff, id.; Kawula, et al., id.; Woods et al., Mol. Microbiol. 3: 43-48 (1989)). Beyond this 39 amino acid N-terminal region in Laz is a 127 amino acid region that is highly homologous to P. aeruginosa azurin. (Cannon, Clin. Microbiol. Rev. 2:S1-S4 (1989)) Laz is involved in defense against oxidative stress and copper toxicity and increases survival in an ex vivo primary human ectocervical epithelial assay. (Wu, et al., Infect. Immun. 73:8444-8448 (2005))
A third N. gonorrhoeae outer membrane protein, Pan 1, also has the AAEAP (SEQ ID NO: 25) pentapeptide repeat motif (Hoehn and Clark, Infection and Immunity, 60: 4704-4708 (1992)) The size of Lip varies in different Neisserial strains. In strain FA1090, Lip is 71 amino acids in length with 13 repeats of AAEAP (SEQ ID NO: 25) and six amino acids not a part of the repeats. In strain R10, Lip is 76 amino acids in length with 14 AAEAP (SEQ ID NO: 25) repeats. (Cannon, id.) Purified Lip peptide is a potent inflammatory mediator capable of inducing the release of the chemokine interleukin-8 (IL-8) and the cytokine IL-6 by immortalized human endocervical epithelial cells, and the production of IL-8 and the activation of the transcription factor NF-kB by human embryonic kidney 293 cells transfected with toll-like receptor 2. (Fisette, et al., J. Biol. Chem. 278:46252-46260 (2003))
In light of the large number of patients world-wide with serious disorders of the brain and spinal cord, what is needed is a transport system that can take hydrophilic molecules and large molecules across the BBB. Preferably, this delivery system would have a high degree of specificity to allow drugs to be targeted to the brain without making a generally leaky BBB. Further, a successful delivery system would be generally benign and would allow repeated use of the system on the patient without undesirable side-effects. In some cases, a successful delivery system would deliver a drug to all areas of the brain equally. In other cases, the delivery system would deliver drugs specifically to brain cancer cells.